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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

The sun isn't likely to change, the lowest production of solar will always be on winter ... where you need the most electricity.

Right now https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE as an indication, Germany is at around 30% production of their solar capacity.

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Yes, but in the winter wind is quite strong. There will be large storage needs, but mostly in the range of days. The electricity networks are connected all over Europe and production and consumption is already handled on an European level. This will extend more and together with the built-up of much capacity mean, that storage needs are not as high as some put them.

With wind they are other issues, it's very unpredictable far ahead, you need a lot of places to put them and it's already at maximum theoretical efficiency already after 100 years of evolution so there's not even a hope it will improve unlike solar.

At the end yeah you can get out of all of these issues by building 10x the required capacity, but that is reflected on the price and the space to build all of this though.

so you store the energy using hydrogen, and import energy in form of hydrogen from southern regions

that further decreases the efficiency and it's not feasible to store even a month of usage with that.

why not? Germany used to store much higher amounts of gas: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Artikel/Energy/gas-instrume....

Right. And switching heating to heat pumps driven mostly by renewables will mean a large reduction in gas required in total.

We've pulled awful lot of natural gas out of the ground, it seems like there ought to be room for more than a months worth down there.

Wind generators still are getting more efficient - partly because they are still improving, especially in the generator part, but mostly because they are becoming larger and the wind gets stronger the higher you are above ground. And yes, we will need to build more of them, many more. We don't need 10x of the required capacity, but more than the required capacity and then put the excess energy into storage. And of course it always will be a mix of wind and solar.

There was an article a while back talking about running a transmission line from Chile to China so summer, desert sun in Chile could be used to generate solar energy to heat China during the winter. I read (was an HN posted article) either within that article or in the comments that transmission losses would only be ~30%. I wonder if solar panels in North Africa could generate electricity to be consumed during German winter?

well, wind has the highest production in the winter, and hydrogen can basically be stored forever

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